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Johan Bové

Flood Destruction

Do not trust your basement

2 min read

Seeing that devastated family house basement left a big impression on me. The destruction level of a flooded basement full of family memories was really high. 99% of everything in that basement is lost after a couple weeks in dirty, mucky river water and slick. Furniture destroyed after it floated freely in the dark water. When the water eventually recided, all of the stuff, even the heavy furniture pieces, got thrown around the rooms. A photo projector and dias, all in there containers, probably 40 years old, all destroyed. Photo albums completely returned to sticky pulp as the water dissolved the paper. When you try to pick it up, it all falls apart. Old board games, puzzle pieces, even a whole set of the classic electronic Battlefield game, all scattered around the water and covered in muck. The pieces kept coming towards the vacuum cleaner head while I was working to suck out the lower levels of the basement. We managed to get about 100 buckets of stinky dark river water out. Books were everywhere and also completely destroyed. It really hurt me emotionally to see all these family memoriabilia scattered and destroyed like that. Perhaps as a dad, it is one of my worst nightmares that our family memories would be returned to only that ... memories which eventually will be all forgotten and lost.

Never keep your precious things in your basement!

Johan Bové

V-Tech "Download Manager" issues

2 min read

Had a really bad experience trying to get the V-Tech "Download Manager" for their Magic Book 3D to work on Windows 10 - the application window did not resize and I had to put the screen size to a ridiculous 480x640 pixels to be able to get to some point where I could actually use the buttons in the application.

Somehow it detected the 3D Magibook on USB, but then, after waiting for the app to "load", and I was able to see the books to add the media of, the USB connection all of sudden disappeared and I was stuck again. I tried four times to get through the process to no avail.

Luckily I have a Macbook from work. I am not really supposed to use it for private applications, but in this case I was a little desperate. So I installed the "Download Manager" for Mac on it and had to mess a bit with disk access for it work, but was happy to see that all worked well on the Mac version of the application. First of all, a "firmware upgrade" window popped up and I had to go through the whole process.

I am suspecting that this firmware issue is the cause of the Windows problems. After the firmware upgrade, I was able to get the media for the new book we got our son, using the Mac app. But haven't tried with the Windows 10 version of the app.

Disappointing that the experience with the application on Windows 10 is so bad. So I wrote the customer service about it. Let's see what happens next.